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Influences: Kingdom of Heaven, Danse Macabre and Ray Harryhausen

davidsteinmoss
Dec 7, 2015
2 min read

A favourite film of mine is Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005) (the extended version). In one of the scenes Balian (played by Orlando Bloom) the protaganist enters his dead fathers home after travelling to Jerusalem and on the wall is a mural depicting life and death, A 'danse macabre' motif. Written above in Latin is 'Quod sumus hoc eritis' - Such as we are, you will be.

The Danse Macabre

The Danse Macabre or 'Dance of Death' was a medieval art form consisting of death imagery and linked in the same way as 'memento mori'. The art form would portray the form a a skeleton or skeletons representing Death taking away an unwilling victim, some pictures such as the one above would have the skeletons dancing and playing instruments.This artform portrayed the inevitability of death whether you were a peasant or a king and served as warnings against sin.

Links:

https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/13873/introduction.pdf?sequence=18\

Ray Harryhausen

Probably the best ever 'stop-go' creature feature creator was Ray Harryhausen. Ray's clay-mation creatures have terrified me since I was a child, I couldn't even look at the screen when the Medusa from Clash of the Titans was on screen as I feared I would be turned to stone.

I have always found clay-mation creatures far more 'fear inspiring' than modern CGI the jittery movements of the frame by frame movement give the models an extra element of the alien or supernatural. Case in point in the remake of Clash of the Titans vs the original clay-mation

Among Ray's many creatures that he created were the Skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts (1968) (above) and the Skeleton Warrior from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) (below).